There are low wages, poor working conditions and companies treating workers like slaves. Everything else is just an excuse.
Treat workers like humans, pay them fairly so they can live a meaningful life, give them a good place to work, and they WILL work.
I'm not clear why there would be no musicians if it requires minimum wage, razor thin profit margins, etc.
Every $ x billion in PPP could be attributed to .y% of inflation but we don’t talk about capital the way we talk about workers.
On a practical level a minimum wage is either not effective (so broadly set to what the market is paying already o just above that) or it will inevitably decrease job offer.
On a philosophical level, adults should be free to choose what to do with their body and mind - as long as it has no negative effect on third parties.
That's the negative externality.
AFAIK most jobs that would pay under what's enough to live on are entry level jobs usually carried out part-time by students. Denying them such job is removing them that source of income - and in case of jobs that require experience denying them a chance to gain that experience. This means you are not reducing any social externality. You are just shifting those externalities to a different set of people.
I'm also wary of "daling with" this kind of social externalities even if it was possible. If we apply your argument to drugs than the conclusions would be that alcohol and any other drug should be made illegal because it has a social cost. But I believe people still have the right to do whatever they want with their body and mind as long as there is no direct externality, and I'd rather live with any indirect externality that is the result of that.
This is a rosy view of things, but I don't believe its true. Walk into plenty of markets in poorer or even middle class areas and you will find older people doing these jobs out of necessity. I've seen 'entry level job' used very often as a way to exploit people with not much choice.
The situation is diametrically opposite - minimum wage forces businesses to engage in welfare. Those who have enough margins to engage in welfare might do it; the others may disappear with the jobs, or cut the jobs by reducing service/automating/outsourcing (again leading to the same "social burden" existing).
Yes, turn your country into the likes of Bangladesh. Brillo!
The labor market is not a magical entity. It's comprised of companies doing the hiring and people doing the working.
If you look at sectors where unskilled work prevails and corporations treat workers as fungible resources then the labour market lies firmly in the supply side, and workers have no alternative other than getting exploited. This means paying the least possible amount, which means less than minimum wage.
Think about it for a second: why do you think so many companies pay minimum wage, and not a single cent more? Is is because the workers' negotiating power magically breaks even at the minimum wage level, or is it because labor laws make it illegal to pay less than that?
Also the alternative is having some of those people have zero income and no opportunity to develop skills.
Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships”
They have done real world studies on the issues discussed here and arrive at a different conclusion from you.
Counterpoint: Bangladesh. The labour market does not choose to work 60hr 7day weeks for $75/mo performing skilled sewing of your clothing because they like it: it is because they are left no choice. Given the opportunity, corporations will just as happily enslave Americans as it does third world citizens. Already does, in fact: slavery is still legal via imprisonment.
Corporations could choose to pay their Bangladeshi labour significantly more, and it would cost you only pennies more for your shirts … but they don’t. They pay as absolutely little as possible. They will inevitably do the same to you.
I don't understand. How is the rest paid?
Why would some have no income if minimum wage was higher? The other possibility is that profits would be lower. Minimum wage has increased in the past in various countries, the effect is always pro-worker.
Or we could rationally plan economies to meet everyone’s needs. Enough homes can be made and we already produce more food than necessary.
Positive rights and negative rights are in oppositions as you can't have positive rights without violating someone else's negative rights. We have a trade-off right now, but I personally only believe in negative rights for a variety of reasons.
> Why would some have no income if minimum wage was higher? The other possibility is that profits would be lower. Minimum wage has increased in the past in various countries, the effect is always pro-worker.
Economy 101. Increase the price of something and the quantity bought will be less. Companies will hire fewer people at that price.
> Or we could rationally plan economies to meet everyone’s needs.
History has proved over and over that's not possible (and there are theoretical well known reason why that is.
Planned economies do work, both historically and today. They are immune to the business cycle (as the USSR didn’t experience the Great Depression) and can be more efficient even within capitalist economies (witness Amazon, Apple and Walmart). I recommend “The People’s Republic of Walmart” on this topic.
In a capitalist system companies, trying to maximize profit, will try to expand until it is efficient to do so, but not more or smaller competitors will take over.
The USSR was basically constantly in a Great Depression. According to the US definition of poverty almost all its population was in extreme poverty.
The Great Depression was a Government failure, not a market failure. They didn't print enough money basically.
I believe you might be referring to 2021 Nobel Prize winner David Card’s paper A Re-analysis of the Effect of New Jersey Minimum Wage with Representative Payroll Data (with Alan Krueger) written over 20 years ago. See [1]. This paper compared New Jersey with neighboring Pennsylvania that didn’t raise its minimum wage.
Ironically, Joshua Angrist (and a third Economist) shared the 2021 prize with Card, and Angrist had this to say about the research by Card (and Krueger):
“[the] data show a slight decline in the employment from February to November 1992 in Pennsylvania, and little change in New Jersey over the same time period. However, the data also reveals substantial year to year employment variations in other periods. These swings often seem to differ substantially in the two states… So Pennsylvania may not provide a very good measure of counterfactual employment rates in New Jersey in the absence of a minimum wage change.” See [2].
[1] https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/reanal-ff-nj.pdf
[2] Joshua Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke, Mostly Harmless Econometrics, page 293, https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691120355/mo...
> However it is also true that some people will never accept it as being true.
I suspect it is because of the philosophical point I made, but maybe some people are not able to articulate it? E.g. I could accept my practical point to be invalid but that would not invalidate the second point - I just give freedom of choice value in itself. Hence I can tolerate costs that arise because of that.
About freedom of choice, for me the line is whenever your freedom directly impacts the freedom of someone else. You can't have slaves for this reason. But for the same reason you shouldn't have others pay for your education. Of course you have more choices if someone pays for your education. But that's not the point. Society has no say on what type of education you choose to have, so it should pay no cost. As I mention in another comment I only believe negative rights should be a thing - and I think I have strong reasons to believe this.
Nukes are only good for war, hence you probably shouldn't have them. On the other hand private companies or individuals with the right clearance should be able to own and manage nuclear power plants - as they do.
I don’t think there is anything that only the government can provide. Look at countries around the world and there are examples where governments doesn’t provide public roads, police, laws, health care etc. so people hire their own security, pay for their own education/health etc. Bribe judges to get the ruling they want etc. Even the military used to be private in Europe. With governments hiring private armies to commit war. I personally would not want to live in those countries (they are often called “failed states” for a reason) but they do exist.
So I think the argument that there are things only governments can provide is incorrect. There might be things you happen to want the government to pay for but there doesn’t seem to be an underlying logical argument for why you choose those and not others?
Mostly, with some exceptions. If there is a market failure or natural catastrophe that is going to kill us all and only the government can fix it then I'm OK with that. So, if only the government can prevent a disease to spread or fix pollution, or redirect asteroids, I'm fine with that. But the bar is very high.
> If that is correct then you don’t want the government to provide sea rescue services, weather reports, rules for wearing seat belts, weather emergency services, scientific research
I think some of these can be provided at least to great level by insurance companies but I'm not convinced they can entirely be provided on voluntary basis, so I don't know. But other are clearly of of the scope of my ideal government like rules to wear a seat belt or not.
> scientific research
This is an interesting one. I see lots of people saying that only the government can do valuable research because a lot of recent inventions were initially funded or subsidized by the government - like the internet. I think that private research could work as good if not better. I also think though, why would a private company invest in research if the government is going to tax them and do that research regardless? I think it is an overcrowding issue. Also a lot of technologies that started in government labs are almost unrecognizable after all the private research and development that went into them after.
I'm not saying that negative rights can be achieved perfectly. But positive rights are too problematic IMO, and the further we can shy away from them the better.
My country of origin has subsidized higher education, high redistribution, minimum guaranteed income, a public health system, strong union rights, minimum wage and many regulations of what you can on cannot do with your property.
I left that country, maybe forever. And many many others that got higher education (either in the country or abroad) left and are never going to come back.
The net wage differential of highly skilled jobs with respect to the average income is not enough to justify the long studies if you are going to stay. They even had to create a law that allows people that come back to pay much less taxes if they stay for a given amount of years to try lure some highly skilled people back to the country.
I believe it's because of all these government policies that the economy grows very little in that country. As a result everyone in that country is poorer that other more "negative rights" based countries.
My subjective experience is also that people feel much more entitled in that country and are less able to take personal responsibility. Everything is blamed on the Government (more than in the country I live in now).
I think my country or origin as a social democracy although it's never mentioned because people only talks about the "successful" ones.
I fear that all countries could become like that.
Hold on. I thought you said that freedom was the ability to do whatever you want as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else. Now you added rule #2: You only have the freedom pick from things somebody else (the government?) have decided that you can pick from. That sounds exactly like the system we have in most countries. So if the government decides to make education and health freely available then you should be happy with that right? It follows your rules perfectly.
The government doesn't produce any of those. It has to take from someone else. You can't make any of those things free. You can only make them socialized.
> Nukes are only good for war, hence you probably shouldn't have them.
If they are planning to kill people then that are planning to violate negative rights of others. You lose your rights in that case.
If something is socialised then it is free to choose from. So it is free as in $ and free as in freedom.
> If they are planning to kill people then that are planning to violate negative rights of others. You lose your rights in that case.
Makes sense in principle but impossible to do in practical. Nobody has a mind reader. Nobody can accurately predict the future behaviour of other people. Do you agree that your thinking is impossible to actually implement?
Yes, and that's positive rights. As I said, I only believe in negative rights.
> Makes sense in principle but impossible to do in practical. Nobody has a mind reader. Nobody can accurately predict the future behaviour of other people. Do you agree that your thinking is impossible to actually implement?
Then we don't allow them. It's a price to pay in lost negative rights but only to protect other's negative rights.
So are you happy with that or are you going to pay back the government for your education? If your answer is no would it be fair to say that you want others to not get anything for free but you are perfectly happy to get free things yourself?
I'm happy if it's legal, even if I think it shouldn't be. As long as it's legal for everyone I'm not going to be the only person to pay.
There's no magic hoard of money being sat on by the rich or corporations that could just be used to pay people better in real, inflation-adjusted terms. That's inherently limited by the availability of actual stuff, and the super-wealthy just aren't a high enough proportion of overall consumption that there's any way for them to that. Maybe if we were in a 2008-style crisis where unemployment was high and the problem was the financial system there'd be clever solutions involving redistributing money or something, but that's not the reality we're living.
Sure there is. The hoard of money is called “profits”. Companies pay higher wages and have less profits or possibly (if they can) raise the prices of their goods to compensate.
Our society converts stability and abundance in the production process into precarity and reward/punish incentive structures in the access controls to consumption.
These represent fundamentally different modes of interaction with the economy and social environment. They're different worlds. And what does talk about production in "real terms" say about the value of one over the other?
Of course there can be such a thing as a labor shortage, under many different scenarios (during sustained high rates of real economic expansion, specialized types of labor that are difficult to train enough of, fading-away segments that aren't being replenished with new labor due to lack of interest (yet still require active labor), not enough manual labor, not enough immigration, not enough population growth, and so on).
Low wages can make a labor shortage worse, is the actual context.
If workers need training, why don't companies train them? The majority of workers can't afford training, they barely afford home and food.
Why companies don't train workers? Because they don't want to pay, so they blame workers for not having enough training thus shifting the labor shortage cause to workers, not to themselves.
Would you also say that as long as there are more housing units than people, there's no housing shortage?
Have you ever tried running a company? Let's say you have a band (which is a form of a company. They sell entertainment). You can't find a drummer. Would you train one? How many years are you going to able to wait before you start your band for real while your new drummer trains? In the mean time you aren't able to make any money because the band can't perform.
The average size of a company is 1-4 people. They aren't Walmart size etc.. They don't have the budget to train an employee
https://www.naics.com/business-lists/counts-by-company-size/
We're talking about the kind of training needed to work some garbage CRM that the employer uses, not a decade spent mastering a fine art...
The band U2 trained its singer, on-the-job style. Worked out pretty well for the business.
Do you recall when the pandemic started I think it was the state of Illinois blamed their inability to process employment checks on a lack of COBOL programmers?
It was a really interesting statement. As you say-- blaming people who don't exist for their failure to maintain their systems or create a training program/incentives to ensure that there's a supply of programmers.
I'm sure if it payed well, someone would learn COBOL.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/business/coronavirus-cobol-pr...
There's no labour shortage. There's a lack of currently available labour for the terms you're offering.
Edit: and perhaps some folks who should not be considered as on the labour market, but are labelled unemployed nevertheless.
I don't have it in me to to work in front of a screen all day, although I understand that works for many on this site. I don't care if the workplace is an open office, a cashier's stool at a supermarket checkout, or a train driver's cab.
Although the common use would be funny here :)
When swe work conditions discussion reaches this point I always remember Spolsky's brilliant "Smart and Gets Things Done" book. He writes about KPIs a bit, just enough to not treating it too seriously.
About 4 hours is peak productivity.
We don’t need you to work extra to satisfy our god complex.
We don't pay firemen to put out as many huge fires as possible all day long, because that would lead to very peculiar and unwanted behavior incentives to max out those metrics. Firemen hiring pyromaniacs to make them look good, etc.
Plenty of jobs out there where the metric you're trying to maximize is internal/external customer satisfaction, usually something like maximize service uptime. If your assigned responsibility is the accounting dept, and the accounting dept loves you because when they report a problem its rapidly fixed, then you're doing what the company needs.
Some companies refuse to metric stuff like implementing change, because it results in I (heart) change for the sake of change. I quickly close a ticket to tweak the background color on an internal app but that doesn't make the company any money.
There are jobs like mining coal or farm work, where paying you to not produce makes the owners very angry. Sometimes being in a non-productive cost-center has its privileges. "You're paying me so IT is never in the way of production dept" or IT never gets in the way of accounting so accounting never gets in the way of the production dept, etc.
Big industrial factories usually have a maint department whom do nothing but fix machines. If none of the machines are fixed you don't punish the maint dept LOL. Usually they have pointless busywork if nothing else is going on "go repaint the milling machine". Such things exist in IT "go update the reverse DNS records".
Just now I've noticed that downvotes have started to pour in. I am convinced that there is a troll army from a foreign nation-state sent to sow discord, or maybe the Pinktertons, who still have a sophisticated union-busting intelligence group, and get paid tons of money for it by "Great Place To Work" companies you might not expect.
"Sorry but I'm working with another client right now I will get back to you"
You bill more per hour; you bill less than 40 hrs/wk; you get higher pay but have to pay full cost of insurance; it averages out. Then there's the other issue where the pay for some technology positions is so high that even if I only got half pay I'd still be pretty well off in general life ...
My long term experience is people say they like working less than 40/wk but in practice everyone seems more happy with work 80 this week and near 0 next week depending on workload. If the company had precisely 40/wk of work to do every week then they'd skip the contract hassle and hire a feudal peon aka full time "long term" W-2 employee, but contractors provide day to day flexibility.
At companies that are more successful than median, they don't outsource their core competencies so you won't get contractor positions to do "rockstar" revenue generating stuff, but they still need temps to do conversion projects or expansions or experiments. At companies less successful then median, they will outsource their core competencies so you could contract program at a below average software company. My point is its easy and common to get unusual side background unseen work at great companies, and only be in the middle of things at failing companies, so if you want a different combination, like being a rockstar at the center of a great company, you generally have to be a W-2, sadly. Then again there's a lot of money to be made under the contractor model.
a) Dependence on recruiters/headhunters who take a cut (20-50%+ of your 1099 income)
b) A strong, solid network so broad as to always have leads and offers to keep you busy throughout the year, year after year
c) A giant's reputation: you're well-known elite in one of the FAANGs and built something a lot of people use; you've published books or make speeches at conferences. You're the inventor of some open source tool everyone uses.
Since c is out of my range, I attempted b and find I didn't have that type of skill (or energy) to schmooze and booze my way to a vast network. My past connections from previous jobs are OK, but reasonably loose and they tend to hail from large corporations where there's no contract possibility for my skillset anyway.
I was left with A, which meant that I didn't truly feel independent, but also in the last 3 months of my contracts I would be scrambling and not exactly able to take those 3 months or 6 months off to travel the world like I dreamt. Instead there are lease renewal, healthcare (in the U.S.), and other headaches.
I'm happy to be proven wrong or be offered a "d" option.
Nobody cared until we started to get inflation in the one area we actually need it: wages. Now we have an “inflation crisis.”
Quite silly to say there is no such thing as labor shortage. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/programs/perm...
> The DOL must certify to the USCIS that there are not sufficient U.S. workers able, willing, qualified and available to accept the job opportunity in the area of intended employment
dol literally has a certification for 'labor shortage'
The conspiracy theory going around reddit is that US companies are complaining about labour shortage to try to get their COVID payroll subsidies pardoned.
It could be that this is how large economies grow. The realignment of spending and reopening was growth on top of growth.
On top of that more remote jobs opened up and I want to hear about people who moved to LCOL areas or moved to a bigger job center because they could finally afford to.
Well, that's in theory.
In practice every single country prefer thousands of minimum wage workers employed by Amazon than thousands of unemployed people because Amazon doesn't really need them and hiring a lot of people that do not provide actual value to the company is simply their part of the deal with governments.
Now imagine that there are literally hundreds of smaller Amazons that employ millions of workers.
It's an hard problem to solve, shortage of labor does exist and appear in many forms, one of them is not enough qualified workers for the job.
Where worker protection laws are stronger than US, conditions are better for employed people, but worse for unemployed ones,because the job market is blocked.
Salaries are lower because a stiff market guarantees that workers will have a harder time switching job, they'll accept a lower salary for a job that's safer and protected by the State and work there as long ad they can.
Also: a very limited number of businesses are competing for talents in the job market.
Most of them will only make sure they fill the positions they need at the price they are willing to pay, they won't start offering higher salaries to everybody.
Honestly, I'm just tired of this. People gets attached to some pet theory and just downvote factual comments.
I should know better that some topics are just out of limits for rational discussions.
They do.
Have you ever wondered why unemployment stats are so important for politicians?
> Unemployment is more expensive,
It is not a financial issue.
Nobody in charge wants to be the one responsible for a -10% in eomplynent rates.
Especially if some Amazon like company shuts down their branch in an area where they employ 50% of the population and the other 50% makes a living out of their workers salaries.
EDIT: I don't know why you are being downvoted, what you said makes a lot of sense, but the game is rigged and it doesn't work in a rational way, unfortunately. Especially in "free markets" like the US.
There are countries where Amazon is rejected and the reason, not the immediate reason (unions), but the ultimate reason that affects the bottom line is what I wrote, then deleted.
Anyway I give up, nothing that touches any politics anymore. Some people doesn't deserve my time, really.
I live in Italy.
I am almost 50 years old.
Amazon is only the most popular choice of brand, but all other big companies act like that, unions or not.
I would say that here in Italy, were unions are pretty strong and have been historically even stronger for a long time, many companies have received undeserved favours simply because they employed hundreds of thousand of people (see FIAT in Italy) and in Italy the constitution at art. 1 says "Italy is a democratic Republic founded on labor" so everybody tries to preserve the jobs of those already employed, rising their salaries is not as important.
That's the bottom line, you might think people don't understand you, but truth is realism is necessary to address complex issues.
Another example is public schools in Italy, where unions prefer two teachers at a shitty salary than hire half of them with a substantially higher salary.
Why?
Because that's two jobs created instead of one, during their time, it sounds great in the brochure.
Of course not all unions are equal, of course some of them are fighting for better salaries, bit when the choice is between better salaries for less people or same old salary for more people, they will always chose the second.
What you get here is better social welfare, more work protection, paid holidays, paid sick leave, but much worse salaries than in US because that's not a priority, better salaries for everybody means that companies will start questioning why they should pay more people that can barely do their job, after years of doing the same thing over and over and nobody wants to discuss about that. Unions first.
In Italy salary negotiation is mostly collective, if you hire someone to do job X at salary Y, you have to give the same amount of money to all other workers with the same job X. If you hire Alice and Bob to do the same job and Alice is better than Bob, you can't pay her more than Bob. It's illegal. You can't even promote her at will if the contract requires a minimum seniority before stepping up (for example: minimum two years). I theory its purpose is to avoid favoritism, in practice it completely annihilate the incentive to do better at work.
The only way to negotiate a better salary is working as a contractor, which is another can of worm entirely here, and that also means renounce to almost all the protections.
Don't assume people don't know shit, try to assume people have experience on how a perfectly good solution in theory is going to fail miserably in practice.
They are hiring all those people to have leverage in governments deals.
But they could automate a lot more, hire much less people and make higher profits, at the cost of more scrutiny from the government: it recently happened in Italy where they have been fined for abuse of dominant position and immediately after they announced a program to hire a thousand more workers by year-end.
Labor shortage just means that the market is not in equilibrium where for all the conditions labor is asked for there is an offer available on the market. It goes both ways.
Consider the device you used to post your comment, where did it come from?
I assume most of the ppl here either held a h1b or a worked with ppl on h1b.
Strange thing to say on here.
Labor shortages and H1-B visas have very little to do with each other.
There’s a shortage of people willing to work for low wages.
Let the market decide, and let the welfare to help those truly in need(those disabled or mentally ill, but not the lazy), use tax as a way to mitigate the gap.
It's imperfect, but nobody has designed a perfect system yet. The government actually did its part(food stamps, free lunch, section 8 housing, no tax or low tax for low income families,etc), doing more will lead all of us to poverty(been there seen that).
Europe has pretty much everything in the spectrum and, so far, it hasn’t led us to poverty.
> and let the welfare to help those truly indeed
That's more like Socialism than Capitalism, that's for sure.
> use tax as a way to mitigate the gap
This is Capitalism?
> It's imperfect, but nobody has designed a perfect system yet.
You could just as well be defending Socialism with that comment.
They're not black and white binary choices, keeping capitalism as the backbone is key. If you really like socialism, welcome to Venezuela.
* Universal healthcare.
* 4 or more weeks of paid vacation per year for all full-time employees (and some proportional setup for part-time).
* ~6 months of paid (albeit not 100% of ones salary) parental leave per parent, per child.
* Subsidized child care to make it affordable for everyone.
* Government funded university tuition (student debt is only in the form of upkeep).
* Employer/Government funded sick pay (at least 6 months).
Because these things and more are what you're missing out on in the US. Year by year.
Is it really worth it? What's the point of having a higher salary if it's just consumed by higher rents, healthcare fees etc and no time to actually enjoy the money (vacation)?
And how many people get to go? And who chooses which majors are available?
If you have a pulse, you can get into a US college/university.
All who qualifies through grades or tests.
> And who chooses which majors are available?
The universities.
> If you have a pulse, you can get into a US college/university.
That doesn't seem to be the case, and certainly not without significant student debt.
And yes, there are free and/or very low-cost colleges in the US. (https://www.sjcc.edu/ is under $1,500/year.)
The fact that some people choose to go to schools that cost and then can't afford what they spent doesn't change that.
It is interesting to look at what many of the people complaining about not being able to pay choose to study.
Perhaps we should have told them no.
Why would you say that?
> And yes, there are free and/or very low-cost colleges in the US. (https://www.sjcc.edu/ is under $1,500/year.)
Clearly seem to be a problem of either US-ranking of universities or their general availability. Otherwise this wouldn't be a problem?
> It is interesting to look at what many of the people complaining about not being able to pay choose to study.
That sounds just like the reactionary whine about non-STEM education.
Because you wrote "All who qualifies through grades or tests." That implies that folks who don't qualify don't get to go.
> Clearly seem to be a problem of either US-ranking of universities or their general availability. Otherwise this wouldn't be a problem?
Or it's mostly a problem for people who find it easy to get press coverage.
>> > It is interesting to look at what many of the people complaining about not being able to pay choose to study.
> That sounds just like the reactionary whine about non-STEM education.
I've nothing against non-STEM education, but I do object to paying a lot for it.
Well, yes, of course? Why wouldn't both the uni and students want a threshold to ensure that no one's time is being wasted? But this doesn't mean that people are barred by tuition or crippled by debt when/if they graduate.
> Or it's mostly a problem for people who find it easy to get press coverage.
Since I'm not from the US I had to google the distinction and from what I can tell a community college main PR is that one may be "transferred" to more prestigious institutions. So it definitely doesn't sound as equivalent as you present it.
> I've nothing against non-STEM education, but I do object to paying a lot for it.
Luckily any decent society consists of more than smug tech folks like this place.
Like I said, the US doesn't tell people they can't go. Your country does.
We also don't tell them what they can study.
> Since I'm not from the US I had to google the distinction and from what I can tell a community college main PR is that one may be "transferred" to more prestigious institutions.
Not at all.
Moreover, there are less-expensive "big-time" colleges. You only hear the stories wrt certain types of schools. (In most cases, they're the kinds of schools that are extremely rare outside the US. Even the second-tier schools in the US are very good. For example, Apple employs more graduates of a school that few people outside of CA have even heard of than it does graduates of Berkeley even though Berkeley is significantly larger than said unknown school.)
So, should we tell them "no" up front?
> > I've nothing against non-STEM education, but I do object to paying a lot for it.
> Luckily any decent society consists of more than smug tech folks like this place.
You already said that you/your country won't pay much, so why is it wrong for me to express the same sentiment?
What do you mean by can't go? People "can't" go to high-school either if they don't get the minimum grades required in elementary school. How does this even relate to the money angle that I'm criticizing?
> So, should we tell them "no" up front?
What do you mean by telling who no up-front? By requiring that you actually have finished high-school math before being accepted for a 4-year math program in uni? That's just common sense.
> You already said that you/your country won't pay much, so why is it wrong for me to express the same sentiment?
Uhm, no? In what way?
The US lets people go to college who haven't graduated from high-school.
Flunk out or quit, and you can go back.
> > You already said that you/your country won't pay much, so why is it wrong for me to express the same sentiment?
> Uhm, no? In what way?
Your country says "we'll let n people into college." or "we'll spend $x on colleges, which is basically the same thing. The tests are then used to pick those n people.
What happens to the other people, the people you won't pay for?
35-40% of US adults have graduated from college. (Different sources have different numbers.) >10% of US adults attended some college and didn't finish. (Some do go back.)
Not sure what your point is. All who qualifies is paid for? If you don't qualify you can take classes to make you qualify, also at no cost.
The argument is about where that point lies with respect to a minimum, living, or worthwhile, wage.
I'll be sure to tell my history professor. He'll be interested to know that all those textbooks he wrote about Europe immediately after the bubonic plague were wrong.
"There is no Ferrari in my garage" vs "there is no such thing as Ferrari"
America, as currently patterned, is a fragile society. People balance work and family through ad-hoc systems with few redundancies. Now a pandemic comes around that killed a bunch of people who were providing informal support for the main workforce.
A man in Georgia can't do full-time anymore because he's a single dad and the daycare shut down for the duration of the pandemic. A mom exits the workforce because the grandparents who were watching the kids after school are now dead. Someone loses someone dear to them and re-thinks their life direction. These things add up.
But I had the impression people were unable to retire or retiring significantly later.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
Dick's Deluxe starts pay at $19 and has benefits. Their burger is $1.80.
"Customers may pay anywhere from $3.75 for a Big Mac in Austin, Texas, to $6.39 in Seattle. For Cheeseburgers, the variation was even greater, from $1 in places like Chicago and Houston to $2.29 in New York City."
https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/financing/why-big-m...
big macs costs significantly more in locations that have high labor costs -> "they're just using the high labor costs an excuse to charge more!"
big macs costs slightly more in locations that have high labor costs -> "see! that proves we should raise minimum wages!"
But my point is that the commenter overstated the impact of paying higher wages dramatically.
Big Mac’s have been pricey here for awhile. Reminds me of Swiss McDonald prices almost, though I’m sure the 11 CHF Big Mac meal from 2006 costs a lot more there now.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/city_price_rankings?it...
Even if you blindly assume that revenue is tied to salaries, are salaries in the US only 20% apart?
Your citation also points out that a McMeal in Spain is cheaper, and I'm sure that quality of life + benefits in the US is even in the same division, specially give that Spain has free healthcare for all.
The truth of the matter is that workers in the US are massively exploited and abused, and that as a deep impact on everyone's quality of life, even the privileged.
$10 is a little misleading, as that's the very topend places in USA. Check out El Paso, it's closer to $6.
What would happen if easy fast food went away? I suppose people wouldn’t eat the same quantities of food? So the farming requirements wouldn’t change.
Slower restaurants aren't an option - they take far more time and money then people in this situation have.
I don't know what percentage of those shitty part-time jobs are fast food, but all of those jobs are gone along with the places if we imagine snapping our fingers and decreeing No More Fast Food. Some might be substituted by increased demand at grocers?
I feel like one possible result is former fast food workers who do find some measure of fulfillment in the job of "feeding people" pooling their resources and creating some kind of neighborhood co-op kitchen that feeds their community, with a very different allocation of the money brought in by people paying for the food - more towards paying the workers and getting good ingedients than to increasing shareholder returns. Someone's probably gonna try to get rich off of doing this too of course. Depending on what kinds of resources they can acquire there might be a shift towards purchasing food from more local farmers, or even growing some crops themselves.
That's my first guesses, at least.
Well aside from the fact that paying rent on one person’s salary is nigh-impossible these days.
I recommend looking at the labor participation rate over the last 5 years. We dropped from 63% to 61.5 %.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-parti...
American wages have been stagnant for over 30 years while benefits, pensions, job security, and working conditions have continued to erode. If you think that’s not going to have any consequences, you’re lying to yourself.
Unemployment insurance only lasts 6 months, is very difficult to live on for low wage workers, and people just generally know that not working is very bad because it wrecks your job history and resume.
Additionally, the majority of Americans’ finances are in very poor shape, which is why Biden was forced to extend the moratorium on student loan payments. To take your word for it, we would also have to explain why employment was ever so high to begin with.
> The University of Michigan study found that, among working Americans who were in the bottom 20 percent in income in 1975, approximately 95 percent had risen out of that bracket by 1991—including 29 percent who had reached the top quintile by 1991, compared to only 5 percent who still remained in the bottom quintile. The largest absolute amount of increase in income between 1975 and 1991 was among those people who were initially in the bottom quintile in 1975 and the least absolute increase in income was among those who were initially in the top quintile in 1975.
> In other words, the incomes of people who were initially at the bottom rose more than the incomes of people who were initially at the top. This is the direct opposite of the picture presented by Census data, based on following income brackets over time, instead of following the people who are moving in and out of those brackets.
> Similar patterns appeared in statistics from the Internal Revenue Service, which also followed given individuals. The IRS found that between 1996 and 2005 the income of individuals who had been in the bottom 20 percent of income tax filers in 1996 had increased by 91 percent by 2005, and the income of those individuals who were in the top one percent in 1996 had fallen by 26 percent.{316} It may seem almost impossible that the data from the Bureau of the Census and the data from the IRS and the University of Michigan can all be correct, but they are. Studies of income brackets over time and studies of individual people over time are measuring fundamentally different things that are often confused with one another.
Would an 18 year old be expected to make the same money as a 50 year old? Even the most unskilled laborer sees pay increases over time.
Same as business as always had.
If we maintain that then we will have a free market in labour. Pay the price or don’t get any.
Or spend the capital automating and working out how to do more with less. It is supposed to be capitalism after all.
>Same as business as always had.
"business as always had" that option? Clearly they don't, otherwise they'll never cave to strikes.
Or do they finally come together to share the spoils of mutually beneficial activity? Which is what a market is supposed to be about.
Seems like in the labor force, a "worker's market" only comes around once in a lifetime. For most of my life it's been an "employer's market".
83% of the value of all the 2020-21 Paycheck Protection Program loans were forgiven as of December 19th, 2021 [1]. That's a total value of $653,038,613,899. That's nearly as large as the 2008 bailouts. Even that doesn't tell the whole story because 94% of the 2020 loans alone were forgiven, and 2021 is on track to meet it.
[1]: https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/2021-12/2021.12.19_W...
My counter: The labor-force participation is still at historic highs compared to the 1950s through the early 70s, but not as high as its peak in 2000 [2]. Combined with relatively normal unemployment historically [3] the market for labor is squeezed. After 40 years of neoliberal policy dismantling state programs they've released as much marginal labor as possible, and we are all now seeing a return to historic norms.
[1]: https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/where-have-all-the-w...
That is, the two 60%s tell different stories. Of course, the right way for me to see this is if housewifery rate has returned to the baseline, or if female labor participation rate is similar to what it was, or if households can be supported and are supported in the same way as the past.
My impression was that the rapid growth in labor force participation was because of women. But I have not recently tested if that is correct. M
The problem is not companies practicing wave slavering, but government social aid and early retirement?
Is this you are saying?
The argument your making is that the US stimulus checks are so great that business just can't compete with laziness. Yet the total cumulative stimulus is less then the poverty line. If business can pay someone above that line than maybe there labor is better spent elsewhere or at least that time with there families.
Now that's harsh but that's the way that your argument comes across. Now the original post balances with reason by saying stimulus has given people room to not work at low paying jobs but it's not necessary because they are lazy but because they jobs they work suck and pay like crap. Hence the reason business will raise wages because that is the major problem. Working retail where people are rude and mean is not pleasant and if you want people to deal with unpleasant people you have to pay them more